Chapter Four
Lane was mildly surprised to discover that the Mariner wasn’t a burden. The old man knew his way around a spaceship. He possessed a remarkable mind, filled to the brim with the trivia of a thousand planets, much of it quite useful to Lane in his pursuit of exotic life forms. He also knew how to skin a carcass as neatly as any Dabih, which meant that Lane was able to get by with a crew of two: himself and the Mariner.
Even the Mufti, who ordinarily tolerated no one but Lane, took a liking to the Mariner. The old man spent hours each day recalling past glories and adventures in the purplest of prose, and by the time he was done recounting the day’s quota of stories the Mufti could usually be found curled up on his lap, purring gently and allowing the Mariner to scratch between what passed for its shoulder blades.
They made two short hunts, each of about three months’ duration. Then Lane took an order for two dozen Horndemons, enormous omnivores with truly phenomenal antlers, from Ansard IV, a planet which was within half a parsec of the Pinnipes system.
“Now maybe we’ll catch a glimpse of him,” said the Mariner as the Deathmaker took off for Ansard.
“Mariner,” said Lane, “even a patient man like me gets a little tired of hearing about the Starduster every other day for six months. Besides, it’s been more than a year since I was at Pinnipes—and I still don’t know for a fact that it wasn’t an alien ship.”
“Nonsense,” said the Mariner. “We both know damned well what you saw. Are you afraid that if you admit it you’ll have to hunt it down?”
“No,” said Lane. “But it’s a big galaxy. There’s a lot of stuff out there. The odds that we both saw the same thing are pretty slim.”
“You don’t think God would make two creatures like that, do you, Lane? You saw the Starduster, all right. What I can’t figure out is why you’re so loath to acknowledge it.”
“Maybe I just don’t want to get interested in it,” said Lane. “I can see spending a half century trying to hunt the damned thing down without ever getting within hailing distance of it. Besides, there’s no money in it.”
“Well,” said the old man, “I suppose that’s one way to fight temptation. Me, I’d rather look it right in the eye and stare it down.”
“Just don’t tempt me to grant you your last wish a little prematurely,” said Lane.
“You’re talking through your hat, Lane. Even having me irritate you about the Starduster is better than being bored to death all by yourself.”
“Tell me, Mariner, does anyone else call it the Starduster?”
“Dunno,” said the Mariner. “Probably not. It goes by a lot of names: the Dreamwish Beast, the Starduster, the Deathdealer, half a dozen more. Names don’t matter. You know what it is. So do I. Starduster’s as good a way of identifying it as any other.”
“Why Deathdealer?” asked Lane. “Has it ever killed anyone?”
“Not to my knowledge,” said the Mariner, “though if it has, I imagine nobody’d come back to tell the story.”
“You know, my first ship was called the Deathdealer.”
“Why not?” The old man shrugged. “A ship’s name is just a way of announcing yourself. Hardly expect Nicobar Lane to scoot around the galaxy in something named the Peacemaker.”
“That used to be the name of a gun, back when we were still Earthbound,” said Lane. “They blew a lot of men apart with the Peacemaker.”
“Contradiction in terms,” said the Mariner. “Nobody ever made peace by killing each other. Of course, they may have temporarily made war unnecessary or impractical, but I don’t see that as being quite the same thing. Peacemaker—hah! You got a lot of faults, Lane, but you’re honest. I’ll give you that. Deathdealer was the right name for your ship.”
“Thanks a lot,” said Lane dryly. “Getting back to the names: Why was it called the Dreamwish Beast? That’s the name I hear most often.”
“It’s the most common one,” agreed the Mariner. “But that doesn’t necessarily make it the best one. Sounds pretty, kind of mystical. Still, there’s nothing dreamlike or wishful about it. It’s a stupid name.”
“Just the same, it’d be interesting to know how the name came to be,” said Lane.
The old man pressed his lips together and made an obscene sound. “Dumb name. Starduster, that’s what it is.”
“Have it your way, Mariner,” said Lane. “Ready for some dinner?”
“Breakfast,” corrected the old man. “And no, I’m not ready. Got some work to do.”
“What?” asked Lane.
“Haven’t plotted out the Starduster’s feeding grounds yet,” said the Mariner. “Ought to do it, so we’ll know where to look.”
“First of all, you’ve got almost two Standard months before we reach Ansard,” said Lane. “And second, we’re hunting for Horndemons, not the Starduster.”
“If I can show you where it is …” began the old man.
“No,” said Lane firmly. “Now, are you coming back to the galley to eat?”
“Later,” said the Mariner, his hand working so swiftly on the Carto-System that his fingers became nothing more than a blur as they raced over keys, switches, and levers. Lane shook his head and walked to the galley to fix his dinner.
When Lane returned half an hour later the old man had thrown a new chart into the Carto-System, which now displayed a twelve-parsec section of the galaxy, encompassing Pinnipes, Terrazane, Canphor, and perhaps two dozen other stars and worlds around which the Starduster had been sighted during the past century.
“See the cloud?” said the Mariner, flicking a pair of switches that activated a glowing three-dimensional cloud of interstellar dust and debris. “It starts a parsec past Terrazane, winds in and out of the Canphor region, and up past Pinnipes.”
“That’s an awfully sweeping generalization, Mariner,” said Lane, looking at the chart. “Hell, the cloud doesn’t come anywhere near Canphor. And look here—it goes right past Alphard, and there’s never been a sighting in that region.”
“Who can say what its exact habits are, Lane?” said the Mariner. “All I know is that every sighting I’ve heard of has been within a parsec of the cloud, and usually a hell of a lot closer.”
“Even if you were right,” said Lane, “a fact I am granting solely for the sake of argument, that’s still a mighty big dust cloud. You could spend ten lifetimes without covering more than a third of it. Don’t forget: when we go at light speeds, or even near them, our sensors are just about as useless as our eyes. There’s no way to conduct a thorough search even if you had a captain who was willing to hunt for it.”
“Don’t have to,” said the Mariner. “Standing where you’re at, his progress has always been from right to left. Now, Pinnipes isn’t that far from the end of the cloud, so it stands to reason that he’s somewhere between Pinnipes and—”
“What makes you think he hasn’t doubled back?” interrupted Lane, interested in spite of himself. “He’s been around a long time, maybe longer than the whole race of Man. It seems to me that he’d know the limitations of his pasture by now. Why mess around at the edges?”
“No,” said the old man, shaking his head. “He’s got to be a creature of habit, Lane. He hasn’t got any natural predators, so he can go wherever he wants. There’s a pattern to things in the universe, a regularity that could only exist when Chance operates on this huge a scale. He’ll feed down to the end of the cloud, then come back again.”
“If he exists, and if he eats the dust cloud,” said Lane.
“He exists, all right, as sure as Satan sits on the throne of Hell,” said the Mariner.
“Listen, Mariner,” said Lane, “we’re going to be cooped up here for another fifty or sixty days. I’m going to expect a little variety in your conversational subject matter in the days to come, and if I don’t get it, both of us are going into Deepsleep.”
“I’ll make you a deal, Lane,” said the Mariner after a short silence.
“What?”
“How long do you plan to take catching the Horndemons?”
“Five weeks, maybe six,” said Lane.
“If I show you how to do it in less than a week, can we spend the other five weeks looking for the Starduster?”
“I’ve never even seen a Horndemon,” said Lane, “but according to the data in my ship’s computer, it’s going to take more than a month just to hunt them down. They live in the thickest part of a rain forest. Also, we’re going to have to pick them off one at a time; they take forever to die, and I don’t need four or five wounded Horndemons ganging up on me at the same time.”
“You didn’t answer me,” said the Mariner. “Is it a deal?”
“It can’t be done.”
“Then you’ve got nothing to lose, have you?” said the old man with the kind of smug smile that made Lane want to rearrange his face.
“Look, Mariner, according to the computer—”
“Lane, who the hell do you think charted the damned planet?” said the Mariner. “Everything your computer knows is based on my reports.”
“Then you know something that wasn’t in the reports?” said Lane.
“Of course I do,” said the Mariner. “I made my reports for miners and colonists, not for hunters.”
“Am I correct in assuming that you won’t tell me what you know if I don’t agree to your terms?”
“That’s right, Lane.”
Lane lowered his head in thought for a long minute.
“All right, you old bastard,” he said at last. “You’ve got yourself a deal. Now, how are you going to kill the Horndemons?”
“You’ll see,” said the Mariner with a grin. “In the meantime, I’d suggest you start thinking about how you’re going to kill the Starduster. We can talk about it when I’m through with breakfast.”
He rose and hobbled off to the galley, singing an old space chantey about a bald, green-skinned woman named Beela who had three of everything that might conceivably be considered important.